Goregrind

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Goregrind is a genre mixing Death Metal and Grindcore. Bands playing in this style feature extremely violent or medical terminology for lyrics, extreme, and for artwork (often times very real pictures), a deviation from the political messages of most Hardcore bands, and many bands make use of pitch shifted or extremely low guttural vocals. The credit for the first Goregrind band goes the United Kingdom's Carcass, formed in 1985 who's debut Reek Of Putrefaction became a favourite of DJ John Peel. Other notable early Goregrind acts include Sweden's General Surgery formed in 1988, United States' Impetigo formed in 1987, and the Netherland's Last Days Of Humanity formed in 1989.

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goregrind Music Reviews

See that splattery carcass on the front cover? How do you feel looking at it? If you feel revulsion or disgust, look no further. You won’t like this at all. If you’re curious or morbidly drawn to it, this could be of interest. If you’re sexually aroused, then you have some serious problems, and this is a great soundtrack for a date.

Paracoccidioidomicosisproctitissarcomucosis is a couple of noisy Mexicans who love mixing gruesome gore with sadistic sex. While many would say the only remarkable thing about the band is their lengthy name, goregrind/pornogrind fans have a bit of a soft spot for these cheerful chaps. Ginecologic Cryptococcidioidomicosis (better known as Isaac to his Mum) on drums, vocals, and intro samples, and Infection Cutane and Sensational Genital (called Hugo when he’s down the pub) on guitars, bass, and vocals play noisy, downtuned, sludgy, amorphous grindcore. The aim of this music seems to be to play seemingly random rhythms as fast as possible, while simultaneously filling as many bass frequencies as possible with gargling, throbbing, beautiful noise. Thousands of bands the world over do it. Some do it better, a lot do it worse. The important thing is at least they are doing it.

So, once you get past the gaping chest cavity on the front cover, the CD inside is covered with intestines. Take it out and you reveal a collage of sexual horrors on the back inlay, which include gaping orifices, multiple organs, bodily fluids, and various glorious, sickening perversions. Packaging and presentation is a big thing with this style of music. If you’re going for disgusting, you need gross in as many elements as possible.

Oh yeah, there’s some music here too.

First off, there’s an intro called “Toward The Apocalipsex”, to lull the unwary into a false sense of security. It’s a little unexpected, combining despairing cries with acoustic. This is well executed for a band playing in a genre often known for endless churning distorted chords, rather than finger picking.

It leads into second track “Uruporfironogenodescarboxilandome Y Pustulandome Con Tu Anorgasmia Exaclorobencenosisticarial Sexo Traumatizante” (I love copy and paste with these song titles!), which starts with a movie soundtrack sample combining shagging and slaughter before the music bursts forth in all it’s filthy glory. Often bands of this ilk can’t write a riff to save themselves, and cover their deficiencies with incessant grinding, persistent blast beats, and as much gutturality (is that a word? Fuck it, it is now!) as possible.

Paracoccidioidomicosisproctitissarcomucosis set themselves apart by crafting a lot of memorable riffs, although the riffs don’t exactly shine through the musical murk, and the song construction seems somewhat haphazard. The top end is also not neglected, with plenty of squeally guitar silliness that isn’t exactly leads or solos, but the icing on the top.

The lyrics are rendered indecipherable through a combination of lengthy medical terminology, distorted, garbled vocals, and Spanish. Hey, I’m not being discriminatory here. I’m sadly monolingual, but I’m betting even a dedicated Mexican grind lover couldn’t tell you what was being growled here.

Third track “Grotesque Mucopurulence (Disgorge's Sensation)” throws in something a little different. The vocals are indecipherable English this time.

By now it should be obvious what the remaining tracks are going to sound like. Rather than list all ten with their medically improbable names, describe the disturbing samples, and attempt to explain what differentiates one song from the next, it is easier to say the band has a formula, but this is not formulaic. These guys know what sort of noise they like to make, and are pretty fucking good at it.

This music is underground for a reason. If you’re feeling brave or adventurous, exhume and enjoy. If you’re struggling to keep your lunch down, no one will think less of you for it. And if you’ve been whacking off whilst listening to this, I really don’t want to know what sort of porn you have on your hard drive.

Ever listened to a harsh noise or grindcore demo and wondered how the musician... no, performer, because this may not be music, is actually making those hideous/beautiful sounds? Have you considered what instruments might actually be involved? Is this created by over-amplified, distorted strings, or by some evil Dr Frankenstein electronic circuit soldered together with crowbars? And is that a human voice, altered beyond bestial into impure noise too dirty to be called white? Drums or machines? Are the microphones used in the recording process broken, or can human-created devices tolerate such stresses far beyond the red-line? Is this just the hideous nightmare outpourings of a cybernetic entity spontaneously formed inside a labyrinthine silicon chip?

In short, have you ever wondered where the boundary between noise and music is?

Here it is, right here.

Don’t try to understand or interpret “Phyllomedusa, The Destroyer”. Like quantum physics, it just is, and it’s beyond the understanding of most humans. There are two correct responses. The first, and more usual, is to recoil like pain receptors flinching from a flame. The other is to seek more, yearning for further stimulation of already overloaded pleasure sensors, like an overdosing addict knowing death will result but plunging the needle ever deeper in search of that elusive final apocalyptic high.

Few will tolerate this. Fewer still will find gratification. But which urge is stronger- fear of the potentially unpleasant and painful, or the desire and drive of Sacher-Masoch’s perversion?

If a frog croaks in the swamp and nobody hears it, did it really make a noise at all? The answer to this slight rephrasing of George Berkeley’s 1710 philosophical though experiment is “fuck yeah”, but the more important question is if that croak was “Spikeballs & Monklets (CxBxFxIxHxFxLxFxRxE Vs Phyllomedusa)” would anyone really want to hear it?

There’s really only one reason most people would ever attempt listening to this split shared between CxBxFxIxHxFxLxFxRxE and Phyllomedusa, and that is to hear one of the oddest covers of Blondie’s “One Way or Another” ever recorded, distorted into a weird mass of grind, sludge, and noise. That comes later, but first, the rest of the album.

Catastrophic Blunt Force Intracranial Haemorrhage Fluid Leaking from Ruptured Eardrums, or CxBxFxIxHxFxLxFxRxE is actually a far more entertaining name than the music. Their contribution to this split seems to be their first release. “Removing the Limbs of Sacrificial Bodies, Displaying the Gastrointestinal Tract from Esophagus to Anus, Hanging in the Trees, the Skin Stripped from the Heads, Lifted Above the Leaves, Blood Dripping to the Forest Floor in Praise of the Great Beelzebufo” (and I’m not writing out that fucking title again!) is a nine minute song, of sorts. It has a comedy intro about toad breeding, before descending into a formless mush of pingy snaredrums, blown out bass, and gargled vocals. Sir David Attenborough even puts in a guest appearance. It seems like the performers are not in the same time continuum, so it’s a bit chaotic. Listening to the full track is something of a feat of endurance. If you get to the end, congratulations! You haven’t actually achieved anything, but at least the racket has stopped.

Pyllomedusa’s lone amphibiphile big frog regularly burps forth frog fancying anthems of wildly varying quality and genre, depending on the species of toad he’s been licking. A majority of his releases are noise for noise’s sake. There might be instruments, or even some element of performance involved, but who can tell. At his most awe inspiring, he spawns sludge so thick and deep it would swallow Mastodons and Iron Monkeys. And in between the two, he can be a one man grindcore battering machine. “Spikeballs & Monklets” falls somewhere between sludge and grind, a stinking swampy mess unique to Phyllomedusa. It is so DIY you can almost see the bent nails and hammer marks where big frog has knocked this all together by himself.

The biggest problem with big frog’s musical output is the lack of variety. The lo-fi recording process means the first song generally sets the tone for the album, and you are going to get several versions of the same song over and over. “Coat The Globe In Toxoid Calamity (Uninjurious To Lissamphibia)” is a thunderous sludge/grind monstrosity. So is “Spikeballs And Monklets (Ephippibane)” and “Browning Of The Bottom Right”, and the next two tracks too. Unfortunately, the tempo hardly varies, the vocals are throat-shreddingly awesome, but totally indecipherable, and the guitars too indistinct for it to matter if there are even riffs involved.

But then along comes the Blondie cover. “One Way Or Another, I'm Going To Kill You” (see what he did to the title there?) is instantly transformed from kitschy New Wave schlock rock into a psychopathic sludge serenade. The bouncy, poppy main hook of the song is hung, drawn, and quartered, becoming a mechanized torture device. Debbie Harry’s laconic vocals are replaced by the gargled, grunted roar of a t-rex with a throat infection. Forget fictional monsters like Godzilla. big frog is a real, live sociopath hell bent on the destruction of mankind for the sake of the amphibians.

This ugly, noisy mess can be listened to for free, and to be honest, it needs to be that price. It was also released on CD, limited to 50 copies, but it would be an extremely dedicated grindcore collector who shelled out for it. As a whimsical mud encrusted, distortion soaked curio though, it might be worth a listen for someone with half an hour to spare and a very open mind.

While the 80s was finding heavy metal to be catching on amongst the public, a few sick minds were going places that Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi wouldn’t have dared! As thrash, death and doom metal were in their nascency, so too was another fledgling subgenre in the metal universe. Coming out of the same English city as the Beatles, Liverpool was a much grimier place than in the 60s and the members of CARCASS were busy stitching together all the most extreme elements of thrash, noise rock and hardcore punk to create their new uneasy listening experience. Although their early pioneering sound has been tagged as splatter death metal, hardgore and goregrind, the style has become universally known as grindcore, and just one look at the album cover collage of autopsy photos of their debut album REEK OF PUTREFACTION is enough to signal a very sick and disturbed musical experience awaits whoever dares play this one!

The band’s roots go back to the days when Bill Steer (guitarist) and Ken Owen (drummer) played together in a school band which led to Steer joining the D-beat punk band Disattack. After a few lineup changes in Disattack, the band changed its name to CARCASS but kept a lot of the punk influences as they sashayed their aggressive noise into metal territory. The new style was fairly original at the time with only Napalm Death even close to where they were going. Their debut album REEK OF PUTREFACTION perfectly displays a midway point between the hardcore and crust punk in the vein of Discharge alongside other angry punk rockers of the early 80s with the early old school death metal sounds that were emerging from the other side of the pond. REEK OF PUTREFACTION was an instant hit on the UK Indie Chart and thus CARCASS was one of the pioneering bands for ushering in a whole new wave of extreme metal above and beyond the more mainstream metal bands dominating the pop charts.

REEK OF PUTREFACTION is one of those albums that i have a love / hate relationship with. On one hand i totally dig the complete anarchic musical experience that has been laid down. The birth of grindcore was a messy affair with the lo-fi indie underground production values made all the more filthy sounding via down-tuned guitar abrasiveness, overdriven bass and blastbeat drum freneticism. The tempos can be blitzkrieg lightning fast or sort of meander on slow burn. Borrowing from the punk playbook, CARCASS adopted the “microsong” approach with no less than 22 songs laid out in the short playing time of 39min 47sec. I also totally love the beautifully titled “Genital Grinder,” “Maggot Colony,” “Microwaved Uterogestation” and “Manifestation Of Verrucose Urethra!” Oh, it’s just so wrooooong, but in a right way ;) On the second hand, REEK comes off as a grandiose experiment that was meant to create a certain reaction but doesn’t quite leave an invitation for repeated visits. Innovative for sure, pleasurable rarely. Luckily CARCASS would continue to evolve and soon become one of the most memorable melodic death metal bands of the 90s but for album number one, a quite memorable but only occasional interesting listening experience.

"Buio Omega" is an EP release by US, Illinois based goregrind act Impetigo. The EP was originally released on 7" vinyl through the The Whisper In Darkness label in 1990. "Buio Omega" bridges the gap between the band´s debut and 2nd full-length studio albums "Ultimo Mondo Cannibale (1990)" and "Horror of the Zombies (1992)". Impetigo were formed in 1987 and released a couple of influential demos in the late 80s. They are often mentioned among the seminal US goregrind acts.

It´s probably wrong to call an act, that is widely considered seminal in their sub genre, generic and lacking an original sound, but that´s more or less how I would describe Impetigo on "Buio Omega". The music, on the 4 track, 10:07 minutes long EP (All tracks were featured in their original versions on "Ultimo Mondo Cannibale (1990)"), is strongly influenced by the early releases by Carcass and I think I hear a couple of nods toward early Napalm Death too. Because of the goregrind image and lyrics Carcass predominantly comes to mind. Impetigo generally have a more humourous B-Horror movie way of writing lyrics which is also obvious from reading song titles like "Dear Uncle Creepy" and "Bitch Death Teenage Mucous Monster From Hell". Although this is undeniably gory and vile, it´s also supposed to be fun (in a bizarre way).

The musicianship are generally sloppy and the material sounds like it´s primarily written for shock value rather than for cathiness or longivity. The sound production makes the music sound muddy, dark, and noisy. The vocals are loud in the mix and vary between unintelligible deep growling, more aggressive intelligible growling, and higher pitched screaming. The pace varies between slow parts and eruptions of blast beat sections. Very noisy and unless you are into this type of goregrind also a bit hard to appreciate. Impetigo may be a seminal act on the US goregrind scene, but they quite frankly sound amaturish and I´m on the verge of calling this a poor release. I´ll settle with a 2 - 2.5 star (45%) rating and recommend that you listen to other US goregrind acts from that era before this one. Acts like Repulsion and Nuclear Death come to mind.